March 2025 Roundtable on Powering Up Your Events with Conversational Engagement
The presentation slides are available as an attachment at the end of this article.
Roundtable on using PropFuel for event campaigns focused on the full event lifecycle: registration, pre-event engagement, sponsorship, in-event support, and post-event follow-up. The CS team emphasized blueprints that cover most setup work, urging teams to customize copy only. Common registration challenges included low response and completion rates, last-minute signups, and reaching beyond “regulars.” Examples showed segmentation and targeted outreach improving registrations and insights, notably American Fence Association splitting members vs nonmembers to tailor discounts and capture reasons for non-attendance.
Pre-event strategies highlighted using PropFuel to segment by intent and needs. ASM Microbe identified abstract submitters, then supported them with financial aid info, guidelines, and schedules, nurturing them toward registration. ICMG ran a rolling badge confirmation flow that let registrants verify preferred name, title, and company for on-site badges, yielding high engagement and reduced on-site edits. For international events, teams set sequenced reminders about travel documents, medical needs, and hotel/flight booking. Pre-event engagement blueprints exist for questions like interests, session choices, app adoption, dietary needs, and logistics.
Sponsorship outreach included NAEP’s early-year interest campaign, collecting intent for sponsorship, advertising, and event registration, enabling targeted follow-ups across the year; 63 companies expressed interest. A sponsor-paid engagement model (seen at GCUC) connected members’ expressed needs to scheduling with relevant sponsors, suggesting a monetizable path for qualified leads, though pricing remained open-ended.
Post-event, NPA used separate attendee and no-show paths to quickly capture satisfaction, issues, and reasons for missing sessions. Simple rating prompts plus follow-up questions generated actionable changes (e.g., adding slides, troubleshooting delivery issues) and informed broader improvements like presenter training or reconsidering recordings if live engagement is the goal. A post-event satisfaction blueprint mirrors this approach. Teams also used QR-linked PropFuel questions for in-venue feedback; for less QR-savvy audiences, onsite devices or simple web forms can help.
Member acquisition opportunities were woven into event flows. ASM targeted nonmember abstract submitters with early-bird and join-to-save messaging, driving engagement and indicated interest in joining, including student memberships. Web Engagement extended PropFuel’s conversational prompts to websites; Arizona Society of CPAs deployed a homepage pop-up to guide users directly to mixer registration or more info, with pathways for maybes and not-now responses. Web engagement supports multi-question paths and open text, complementing email and SMS.
Platform updates included larger Salesforce report pulls (>2,000 contacts), improved Impexium sync efficiency, Fontiva account report integration, auto-activation of branch campaigns when a main campaign goes live (with workflows still needing activation), open-text length limits, local timezone fixes for future sends, and a “magic wand” content helper for web engagement. A global search for campaigns, questions, content, and contacts is slated to launch soon.